Alexandre Dumas : About the Author @ Classic Reader Member Login About the Author One of the most famous French writers of the 19th century. Dumas is best known for the historical novels The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both written within the space of two years, 1844-45, and which belong to the foundation works of popular culture. He was among the first, along with Honoré de Balzac and Eugène Sue, who fully used the possibilities of roman feuilleton, the serial novel. Dumas is credited with revitalizing the historical novel in France, although his abilities as a writer were under dispute from the beginning. Dumas' works are fast-paced adventure tales. They are not faithful to the historical facts, but blend skillfully history and fiction. "'Diable!' he said, after having swallowed the divine preserve. 'I do not know it the result will be as agreeable as you describe, but the thing does not appear to me as palatable as you say.' --'Because your palates has not yet been attuned to the sublimity of the substances it flavours.

Tell me, the first time you tasted oysters, tea, porter, truffels, and sundry other dainties which you now adore, did you like them? Could you comprehend how the Romans stuffed their pheasants with assaf?tida, and the Chinese eat swallows' nests? Eh? no! Well, it is the same with hashish; only eat for a week and nothing in the world will seem to you to equal the delicacy of its flavor, which now appears to you flat and distasteful. Let us now go into the adjoining chamber, which is your apartment, and Ali will bring us coffee and pipes.'" (from The Count of Monte Cristo) Alexandre Dumas was born in Villes-Cotter�ts, France. His grandfather was a French nobleman, who had settled in Santo Domingo; his paternal grandmother, Marie-Cessette, was an Afro-Caribbean, who had been a black slave in the French colony. Dumas's father was a general in Napoleon's army, who had fallen out of favor. After his death in 1806 the family lived in poverty.

Dumas worked as a notary's clerk in Villers-Cotter�tes and went in 1823 to Paris to find work. Due to his elegant handwriting he secured a position with the Duc d'Orléans - later King Louis Philippe. He also found his place in theater and as a publisher of some obscure magazines. An illegitimate son called Alexandre Dumas fils, whose mother, Marie-Catherine Labay, was a dressmaker, was born in 1824. Dumas was an omnivorous reader. Especially he was interested in plays. His first produced drama was La Chasse et L'Amour, written with with Adolphe de Leuven and P.J. Rosseau. It opened on September 22, 1835 at Thé�tre de l'Ambigu-Comique. As a playwright Dumas made his breakthrough with Henri III et sa Cour (1829), produced by the Comédie-Fran�aise.

The romantic drama about power and love was set in the Renessaince court of Henry III and drew on Louis-Pierre Anquetil's Histoire de France and Pierre de L'Estoile's Memoires-journaux. It gained a huge success and Dumas went on to compose additional plays, of which La Tour de Nesle (1832, The Tower of Nesle) is considered the greatest masterpiece of French melodrama. It was written in collaboration with Frédéric Gaullardet. The action centered around the doomed Queen Marguerite de Bourgogne, who had ordered her illegitimate sons to be killed, but who appear into her life twenty years later. He wrote constantly, producing a steady stream of plays, novels, and short stories. "All for one, one for all, that is our device." (from The Three Musketeers) Before 1843 Dumas wrote fifteen plays. Historical novels brought Dumas enormous fortune, but he could spent money faster than he made it. He produced some 250 books with his 73 assistants, especially with the history teacher Auguste Maquet, whom he wisely allowed to work quite independently.

Dumas earned roughly 200,000 francs yearly and received an annual sum of 63,000 francs for 220,000 lines from the newspapers La Presse and the Constitutionel. Maquet often proposed subjects and wrote first drafts for some of Dumas' most famous serial novels, including Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844, The Three Musketeers) and Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (1844-45, The Count of Monte-Cristo). Dumas himself claimed that he only began writing his books when they were already completed in his head. As a master dialogist, Dumas developed character traits, and kept the action moving, and composed the all-important chapter endings - teaser scenes that maintained suspense and readers interest to read more.

The adventures of the three musketeers has inspired many film versions, although the story itself was problematic for American film directors for some decades due to Hollywood's Production Code: d'Artagnan is in love with a married woman, Constance, and has a relationship with Milady de Winter, who actually is Athos' wife, and he feels attraction to Milady's maid, Kitty, whose passionate glances he doesn't first notice. "Then only D'Artagnan remembered the languishing glances of Kitty, her constantly meeting him in the antechamber, the corridor, or on the stairs, those touches of the hand every time she met him, and her deep sighs; but absorbed by his desire to please the great lady, he had disdained the soubrette. He whose game is the eagle takes no heed of the sparrow." The story of the King's Musketeers was continued in Twenty Years After, The Vicomte Bragelonne, Louise de la Valliérre, and The Man in the Iron Mask. The last story has also inspired several film adaptations of the unwanted twin brother of the king, Philippe, imprisoned in Bastille.

His face is covered with an iron mask to hide his true identity. Philippe was "clothed in black and masked by a visor of polished and steel soldered to a helmet of the same nature, which altogether enveloped his whole head. The fire of the heavens cast red reflections upon the polished surface, and these reflections, flying off capriciously, seemed to be angry looks launched by this unfortunate..." Dumas' heroes die romantically in different battles - Porthos is killed by king's men, d'Artagnan is killed in Holland by a stray bullet. At the end of the story, only Aramis is still alive. Dumas' role in the development of the historical novel owes much to a coincidence. The lifting of press censorship in the 1830s gave rise to a rapid spread of newspapers. Editors began to lure readers by entertaining serial novels. Everybody read them, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie, young and old, men and women. Dumas' first true serial novel was Le Capitaine Paul (1838, Captain Paul), a quick rewrite of a play.

It was addressed to a female readership and added 5,000 subscribers to the list of Le Siècle when it was serialized. Along with Balzac and other writers, he also contributed to Emile de Girardin's weekly, La Mode, which became the voice of an aristocratic and wordly tout-Paris. Dumas lived as adventurously as the heroes of his books, and his way of life created a number of anecdotes. When he was asked to contribute 25 francs to bury a bailiff he gave 50 francs and said: "There you are - bury two of them." He took part in the revolution of July 1830 and became a captain in the National Guard, caught cholera during the epidemic of 1832, and traveled in Italy to recuperate. He married his mistress Ida Ferrier, an actress, in 1840, but he soon separated after having spent her entire dowry. With the money earned from his writings, he built a fantastic ch�teau de Monte-Cristo on the outskirts of Paris. In 1850 appeared The Black Tulip, a romantic adventure set in the 17th century Holland.

In the middle of the political struggle for freedom is Cornelius van Baerle, a young man who has devoted himself to tulip-growing. Cornelius is falsely imprisoned for high treason. With the help of Rosa, the daughter of a jailer, he manages to grow a black tulip. Cornelius wins his freedom and hundred thousand guilders in glittering gold pieces as reward for the tulip. "This tulip," continued the Prince, "will therefore bear the name of its producer, and figure in the catalogue under the title, Tulipa nigra Rosa Barlaensis, because of the name Van Baerle, which will henceforth be the name of this damsel." In 1851 Dumas escaped his creditors to Brussels. He spent two years there in exile and then returned to Paris and founded a daily paper called Le Mousquetaire. In 1858 he traveled to Russia and in1860 he went to Italy, where he supported Garibaldi and Italy's struggle for independence (1860-64). He then remained in Naples as a keeper of the museums for four years. After his return to France his debts continued to mount.

Called as "the king of Paris", Dumas earned fortunes and spent them right away on friends, art, and mistresses. He was professed to have had dozens of illegitimate children, but he acknowledged only three. According to a story, when Dumas once found his wife in bed with his good friend Roger de Beauvoir, he said: "It's cold night. Move over and make room for me." Dumas died of a stroke on December 5, 1870, at Puys, near Dieppe. It is claimed that his last words were: "I shall never know how it all comes out now," in which he referred to his unfinished book. Dumas' son Alexandre Dumas fils, became a writer, dramatist, and moralist, who never accepted his father's lifestyle. Dumas did not generally define himself as a black man, and there is not much evidence that he encountered overt racism during his life. However, his works were popular among the 19th-century African-Americans, partly because in The Count of Monte-Cristo, the falsely imprisoned Edmond Dantès, may be read as a parable of emancipation.

In a shorter work, Georges (1843, George), Dumas examined the question of race and colonialism. The main character, a half-French mulatto, leaves Mauritius to be educated in France, and returns to avenge himself for the affronts he had suffered as a boy. Dumas' central works created a romantic fictional history of France, but they also had supernatural elements and characters, that preceded the superheroes of the 20th-century. These stories include Le Château d'Eppstein (1844), a ghost story, Les Frères Corse (1844), where Siamese twins, separated at birth, maintain a psychic knowledge of each other's dire fates, Isaac Laquedem (1853), a Wandering-Jew tale, and Le Meneur de Loups (1857), where a young man agrees a pact with the Devil. His play, Le Vampire (1851), was a Byronic vampire tale. Dumas' story The Man in the Iron Mask was based on the legend of Louis XIV's twin brother. The legend also had inspired Voltaire and Victor Hugo's play Les Jumeaux (1839).

Most author biographies courtesy of Author's Calendar . Used with permission. Alexandre Dumas pere - Biography and Works. Search Texts, Read Online. Discuss. Alexandre Dumas pere Biography of Alexandre Dumas pere Alexandre Dumas, pï¿½re, (1802-1870), prolific French playwright, historian, and author is best known today for his novel (first serialised in the magazine Le Siï¿½cle), The Three Musketeers (1844); It is by his courage, please observe, by his courage alone, that a gentleman can make his way nowadays. Whoever hesitates for a second perhaps allows the bait to escape which during that exact second fortune held out to him. You are young. You ought to be brave for two reasons: the first is that you are a Gascon, and the second is that you are my son. Never fear quarrels, but seek adventures. I have taught you how to handle a sword; you have thews of iron, a wrist of steel. Fight on all occasions.--Ch. 1 This is the counsel young D'Artagnan's father gives him as he sets off to Paris to become a musketeer.

He becomes fast friends with Athos, Porthos, and Aramis and embraces their motto "One for all, and all for one", exemplifying the major theme in Dumas' works of loyalty and honour among men. Like Honore de Balzac (1799-1850) Dumas pï¿½re also wrote several roman feuilleton or serial works; Twenty Years After (1845) and The Vicomte de Bragelonne (1847), including Louise de la Valliere, Ten Years Later, and The Man in the Iron Mask concludes his d'Artagnan Romances. The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), first serialised in the weekly Journal des dï¿½bats was also a huge literary and financial success for Dumas pï¿½re. Through protagonist Edmond Dantï¿½s the reader is taken along his journey of a wrongful trial, his search for justice, revenge, and ultimately riches, forgiveness, and love.

Mirroring Dumas pï¿½re's own life of high adventure and decadence, he based many of his protagonists on historical figures, as is apparent in his Celebrated Crimes series (written between 1839 and 1841) which includes essays on The Borgias, Ali Pacha, Mary Stuart, and La Constantin. Although the issue of his part-African ancestry was not one that Dumas pï¿½re wrote about often Georges: The Planter of the Isle of France (1843) particularly deals with the theme of mixed-race and white colonialism. Dumas pï¿½re collaborated with French historian and author Auguste Maquet (1813-1886) on some of his more famous works; many of them are still in print today and have inspired other author's works and numerous adaptations to the stage and screen.

Alexandre Dumas pï¿½re was born on 24 July 1802 in the village of Villers-Cotterï¿½ts, just outside of Paris, France, the third child born to Marie Louise Labouret, daughter of an inn keeper, and Thomas Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie (1762-1806) a military General under Napolï¿½on. Alexandres' grandfather, the Marquis Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie (1710-1786) married a slave he fell in love with in San Domingo (now Haiti) named Marie Louise Cï¿½sette Dumas (d.1772). Thomas took her last name when he himself enlisted with the French army. After a falling out with Napolï¿½on due to his criticism of the Egypt campaign, and a long imprisonment which left him in poor health, Thomas returned returned home a broken man with no pension. After his death the family was left in dire financial straits. Alexandre's mother set her best efforts to providing an education for her son although he proved to be less than enthusiastic about it.

He attended Abbï¿½ Grï¿½goire's school before finding employment with a local notary to help support the family. In 1822 Dumas pï¿½re set off for Paris and was soon immersed in literary life. He worked as a scribe for the duc d'Orlï¿½ans, later to be King Louis Philippe when the 1830 revolution which Dumas pï¿½re participated in ousted King Charles X. He met noted playwrights and collaborated with them before making his own entrance to the stage at the Comï¿½die franï¿½aise with his plays Henry III and His Court (1829), The Tower of Nesle (1832), Kean (1836), and his Byronic Antony (first performed in 1831) inspired by the works of Lord George Gordon Byron . An avid reader of William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott , his dramas were immensely popular, being among the first of the Romantic movement along with friend and sometimes rival Victor Hugo 's (1802-1885). They were a decided change from the Neoclassic style that dominated Parisian stages at the time.

During this period Dumas pï¿½re had a son, Alexandre fils (1824-1895) with his lover Marie Laure Catherine Labay (1794-1868) who also became a noted author and playwright, being admitted to the Acadï¿½mie franï¿½aise in 1874. Although Dumas pï¿½re kept up his womanising ways, in 1840 he married actress Ida Ferrier (1811-1859) and had an illegitimate daughter, Marie Alexandrine (b.1831) with Belle Kreilssamner (1803-1875). After a short but terrifying bout of cholera during the epidemic of 1832, Dumas pï¿½re was ordered by his physician--"when they have nothing more to say" [from The Glacier Land (1852)]--to take a tour of Europe; on 21 July 1832 he left Paris and embarked on his first of many travels which took him to such countries as Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, England, Germany, and North Africa.

As was his wont, he kept remarkable records of his adventures included in Travel Impressions: In Switzerland (1834), A Year in Florence (1841), From Paris to Cadiz (1847), The Caucasus (1859), and Travel Impressions: In Russia (1860). Dumas pï¿½re continued his prodigious output of essays, short stories, and novels. With the success of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers he sought a place of refuge to concentrate on further writings. He bought land and built the Chï¿½teau de Monte Cristo (nicknamed Chï¿½teau d'If) in Port Marly, Yvelines, France, now a museum. There he worked when not lavishly entertaining guests, but it was not long before he had to sell it when his debts grew too much. In 1851 he fled to Brussels, Belgium to avoid creditors. Further titles published during this time were his Valois Romances including Queen Margot (1845), The Lady of Monsoreau (a.ka.

Chicot the Jester (1845), and The Forty-Five Guardsmen (1847); and The Regent's Daughter (1845), The Two Dianas (1846), The Black Tulip (1850), The Wolf Leader (1857), The Companions of Jehu (1857), and his autobiography Mes Mï¿½moires (written between 1852-55). Alexandre Dumas pï¿½re died on 5 December 1870 at his son's villa in Puys, near Dieppe, France. He was buried in the cemetery of Villers-Cotterï¿½ts, but as of the year 2002 he now rests in the Panthï¿½on in Paris, among other such notable French literary giants as ï¿½mile Zola, Victor Hugo , Jean Jacques Rousseau , and Francois-Marie Arouet Voltaire .

Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man, who like Satan thought himself for an instant equal to God, but who now acknowledges with Christian humility that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom. .... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living. "Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart, and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,--"Wait and hope."--Ch. 117, The Count of Monte Cristo Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2008. All Rights Reserved. The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission.

Forum Discussions on Alexandre Dumas pere Recent Forum Posts on Alexandre Dumas pere Black Tulip, The (unabridged) – Naxos AudioBooks The Three Musketeers (unabridged) Reviews Published in 1850 and set against the turbulence of 17th-century Holland, this is a dramatic story of obsession, adventure, danger and romantic love. Its star is the black tulip, symbol of triumph over evil. Tulip fanatic Cornelius van Baerle is framed for treason by his jealous neighbour, but his sentence is commuted just as the executioner’s axe is raised. In prison Rosa, the jailor’s daughter, nurtures Cornelius’s dream of producing the mythical bloom. A masterly narration re-creates the full magnificence of Dumas’s theatre. Rachel Redford, the Observer The black tulip has come to be synonymous with the concept of artificial demand: that anything, if arbitrarily deemed rare or valuable enough, can become so expensive that its real worth is forgotten. We have come to know of certain black tulips in our own time, including the demand which was created when banks started buying up mortgaged-backed securities and the resulting fall-out.

Alexandre Dumas’s The Black Tulip takes us back to an early example of this in seventeenth-century Holland, where the cultivation of tulips of all colors was a pastime of the wealthy. The Haarlem Horticultural Society devises a contest to award the person who can grow a black tulip a prize of one hundred thousand guilders (which seemed to have been a great deal of money at that time). Naturally, because greedy human beings are involved, the race to be the first one to grow the black tulip compels certain ‘tulip-fanciers’ to go to any lengths – including incrimination – to win the prize. Cornelius van Baerle is an affluent tulip-fancier who has successfully cultivated many types of tulips. He takes up the black tulip challenge and gets very close but his envious neighbor, Mynheer Isaac Boxtel, discovers a means to get van Baerle imprisoned and hopefully executed so that Boxtel may grow the tulip and win the prize.

Van Baerle would be ruined were it not for the beneficence and creative scheming of the jailer’s daughter, Rosa, who falls in love with van Baerle when he is locked up in her father’s jail, and maneuvers to save both him and the tulip. The Black Tulip’s beginning is rather tough going for a modern listener, especially one not familiar with, or particularly interested in, the complicated political machinations of Holland four centuries ago. Dumas uses a rather lengthy, melodramatic exposition to explain the background of his main character, Cornelius van Baerle, and the ways in which this background was used to land van Baerle in prison on trumped-up charges, all in an effort to steal away the prize. If The Black Tulip were written today, there is no doubt that there would be less discussion of this old Dutch political wrangling, but once listeners make their way through this, the twists of the plot draw us in and the exposition is neatly tied to the story’s final thrilling conclusion.

A fascinating story, intertwined with a true-love tale and some truly funny moments –including Rosa’s sarcastic replies to van Baerle when he tries to convince her that he loves her more than the tulip – make The Black Tulip withstand the more than hundred and fifty years that have passed since it was published, and the emergence of more modern examples of artificial demand. Peter Joyce, a stage, radio, and television actor, revels in the reading of Dumas’s characters and this high-stakes story. He expresses the excitement of certain crucial moments– will Rosa succeed in convincing the prince of Boxtel’s treachery in time? – through his beautiful and deep voice, carrying the listener with him through the telling. Joanna Theiss, SoundCommentary Alexandre Dumas is known mostly for The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. His novel The Black Tulip deserves to be better known, and Naxos has done something about it. In an excellently real audiobook, we are taken to late seventeenth-century Holland. There, the conflict between the Dutch and France is one theme of the book, and the obsession with tulips is another.

Treason, deceit, greed and love drive the story of The Black Tulip. Peter Joyce gives it a highly dramatic reading that makes listening to the story almost compulsive. Alide Kohlhaas, Seniors Review The quest to grow a black tulip doesn’t have the same narrative appeal as Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo or Three Musketeers, but it provides adventure enough for those who love the great melodramas of the nineteenth century. Peter Joyce delivers a fine rendition of Dumas’s meaty prose and is especially good at depicting villains and brutal jailers, less effective at conveying his nubile heroine. Although this is a lesser work by Dumas, the author’s judicious detachment, voiced so well in Joyce’s calm and untroubled delivery, holds the promise throughout that innocence will triumph and justice eventually prevail: The villain will be vanquished, and the power of the black tulip will somehow open the prison doors and unite the fateful lovers.

D.A.W., AudioFile Booklet Notes The life of Alexandre Dumas was full of licentious brio and inventive energy: passionate, individual, outrageous, laced with scandals, affairs and illegitimate children, revolutionary in politics and art, irresponsible and irrepressible, and including the apparently mandatory strange pet (Byron had a bear at university; Dumas tamed a vulture). After even the briefest glance at his life, the fact that he wrote several of the best-loved novels of all time seems like a footnote. His grandfather was a nobleman, his grandmother a slave in what is now Haiti; his father was a Creole general of great fame and bravery who left his family very poor at his death when Alexandre was just four. The stories of his father’s bravery stayed with him, however, and were to furnish (burnish, perhaps) some of the adventures of the Three Musketeers. Alexandre lived a rather wild outdoor childhood with the same gusto and energy that he applied to the rest of his life, and learned from an early age to stand up for himself.

He later bore the racism aimed at his mixed race background with considerable grace and wit; and although he was mocked (at times viciously) about it, it seems never to have held him back from preferment or success. Reckless overspending did that. Dumas excelled thrillingly to life He moved from the small town of his birth to Paris as soon as he could, and managed to find a job as a clerk with the Duc d’Orléans largely because of his excellent handwriting. While working for the Duc, he continued his wide and extensive reading and took lessons in the sciences. He started to write in part because he needed the money. His mother had moved to Paris and his lover had borne his first child (also called Alexandre, later a respected, successful and wellknown writer himself). These added responsibilities were beyond the means of an extravagant clerk, and he started to produce short plays and stories. Then, seemingly just by the vigour of his determination, he created one of the most successful dramatic genres in 19th century France. Abandoning the stifling, and in his view repressive, precepts of the classics, he wrote in 1829 a historical melodrama: Henry III.

The public adored it, the Romantics hailed it, the critics hated it; and, leaving his job as a clerk, Dumas arrived on the literary scene. France in the first half of the 19th century was an unstable place, however. In 1830 the King was deposed, and Dumas’s former employer was created ‘Citizen King’. He was not enough of the former and too much of the latter for Dumas’s liking, but this republican zeal was hardly a guarantee of success, and his works immediately after Henri III were failures. It was another few years before he created – again, largely out of a need for money – another hugely popular dramatic genre with Antony, this time a domestic melodrama, one where the passions were expressed and illicit matters discussed. It was again a huge success. This second rise to popularity allowed Dumas to express himself further; he lived in magnificent style and liked to be seen living in this way. He gave a huge costume ball in 1833 at which le tout monde of the arts was invited – the rooms were decorated by Delacroix – and it was the talk of society for years.

Throughout the 1830s, he wrote warmly received travel pieces about his time in Switzerland, Italy, Belgium and Germany, trips undertaken partly because of health concerns, but also because his avowed republicanism made him a target at home. They were popular, though, and allowed him to develop narrative skills, resulting in a shift to novel writing. By the mid 1840s, he had had at least two illegitimate children, had married and almost immediately separated from his wife (the marriage was a financial convenience, although its fiscal success was not much longer than its marital one), and was one of the great men of his age, as well known for his outfits as his work. And what work! He had written The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Man in the Iron Mask. He had opened his own theatre, and had even become a mayor. Purely in terms of quantity, Dumas’s output was beyond prodigious, beyond overwhelming. He worked extensively with others, especially Auguste Maquet, but his energy and drive were frequently too much for them.

They would bring him material thought to be worth attention but dully written and he would invest it with his personal style, panache, dialogue and more. He worked 14 hours a day, wearing out scores of collaborators, and created a kind of industrial production line of novels, plays, journalism, travelwriting and essays (although he successfully sued a rival who accused him of such a process). The numbers are almost incalculable, and in some cases extremely doubtful, for he was often – and often rightly – accused of plagiarism. He would claim almost anything as his, and there is a story that he nearly gave his name to someone else’s prose edition of the Iliad. The Black Tulip was published in 1850 and is something of a departure for Dumas, being a much more intimate tale. Typically it does relish the bloodthirsty (and largely true) events in 17th-century Holland; but its general focus is on the love affair between Cornelius and Rosa, and it has as a central theme the tulip itself.

This may well have a symbolic resonance, since Dumas does not spend much time on the issue of the tulip mania that gripped the Netherlands at the time but concentrates on the idea that such a near mythic plant can survive and grow under the very heels of oppression, much as does the love between Cornelius and Rosa. Dumas fell into and out of fashion over the next 20 years, earned and spent several fortunes, was involved in the uprisings of 1848 in France, and befriended Garibaldi during Italy’s unification. As a result of this last development he became for four years the head of excavations and museums in Italy, and lived in Naples. He founded newspapers and magazines, scandalised society by being pictured with one of his mistresses, and was a dedicated gourmet and gourmand, writing a dictionary of cookery in the 1860s and frequently running from meals to the kitchen to get the recipe. He was occasionally obliged to run from France too, either for financial or political reasons, but he travelled widely in Europe as well as North Africa (where he found the vulture).

He was profoundly good-natured and gregarious but the endless work was always going to wear him down (although his death came relatively quickly). In 1870 he moved in with his son near Dieppe, and died that December. Dumas excelled in historical romances, and brought the past vividly, thrillingly to life, with a stirring sense of adventure and especially strong dialogue, something he had honed from his years as a dramatist. He represented a new kind of pragmatic, liberal Romanticism and gave expression to personal and artistic freedom – from repression, from convention, from stultifying ordinariness. He was a bursting barrel of invention and goodheartedness. He was for life. Notes by Roy McMillan LibriVox Librivox Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain Menu Alexandre DUMAS (1802 - 1870) , translated by UNKNOWN ( - ) The Black Tulip, written by Alexandre Dumas père and published in 1850, is a historical novel placed in the time of Tulipmania in the Netherlands.

The novel begins with the 1672 politically motivated mob lynching of the de Witt brothers and then follows the story of Cornelius van Baerle, godson of Cornelius de Wit. Cornelius Van Baerle has joined the race to breed a truly black tulip – and to win the prize of 100,000 guilders, as well as fame and honour. As he nears his goal he is jailed and then of course rescued – by the beautiful Rosa, daughter of the jailer. Genre(s): Action & Adventure Fiction, General Fiction Language: English The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas - Free at Loyal Books By Alexandre Dumas (Pere) Chapter 1.

A Grateful People On the 20th of August, 1672, the city of the Hague, always so lively, so neat, and so trim that one might believe every day to be Sunday, with its shady park, with its tall trees, spreading over its Gothic houses, with its canals like large mirrors, in which its steeples and its almost Eastern cupolas are reflected, the city of the Hague, the capital of the Seven United Provinces, was swelling in all its arteries with a black and red stream of hurried, panting, and restless citizens, who, with their knives in their girdles, muskets on their shoulders, or sticks in their hands, were pushing on to the Buytenhof, a terrible prison, the grated windows of which are still shown, where, on the charge of attempted murder preferred against him by the surgeon Tyckelaer, Cornelius de Witt, the brother of the Grand Pensionary of Holland was confined.

If the history of that time, and especially that of the year in the middle of which our narrative commences, were not indissolubly connected with the two names just mentioned, the few explanatory pages which we are about to add might appear quite supererogatory; but we will, from the very first, apprise the reader our old friend, to whom we are wont on the first page to promise amusement, and with whom we always try to keep our word as well as is in our power that this explanation is as indispensable to the right understanding of our story as to that of the great event itself on which it is based...

Continue reading book >> Stream audiobook and download chapters Alexandre Dumas Books - Biography and List of Works - Author of '20 Ans Apres' Home > Authors > Alexandre Dumas books Alexandre Dumas Dumas -by-dumas-alexandre/work/690853' >Alexandre Dumas, pere, born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie (July 24, 1802- December 5, 1870), is best known for his numerous historical novels of high adventure which have made him Th e most widely read French author in the world. Many of his novels, including The Count of Monte Cristo and the D'Artagnan Romances , were serialized, and he also wrote plays, magazine articles, and was a prolific correspondent. His paternal grandmother was a Black slave. While his grandfather, Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, served the government of France as General commissaire in the Artillery in the colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), he married Marie-Cesette Dumas , a black slave. In 1762, she gave birth to his father, Thomas-Alexandre, and died soon thereafter.

When the Marquis and his young mulatto son returned to Normandy, slavery still existed, and the boy suffered as a result of being half black. In 1786, Thomas-Alexandre joined the French army, but to protect the aristocratic family's reputation, he enlisted using his mother's maiden name. Following the French Revolution, the Marquis lost his estates, but Thomas-Alexandre Dumas distinguished himself as a capable and daring soldier in the revolutionary army, rising through the ranks to become a General by the age of 31. Thomas-Alexandre married Marie-Louise Elisabeth Labouret and on July 24, 1802 and in Villers-Cotterets, Aisne, near Paris, France, she gave birth to their son, Alexandre Dumas , who would become one of France's most commercially successful authors. General Dumas died in 1806 when Alexandre was only four years old, leaving a nearly impoverished mother to raise him under difficult conditions. Although Marie-Louise was unable to provide her son with much in the way of education, it did not hinder young Alexandre's love of books, and he read everything he could get his hands on.

Growing up, his mother's Stories of his father's brave military deeds during the glory years of Napoleon I of France spawned Alexandre's vivid imagination for adventure and heroes. Although poor, the family still had the father's distinguished reputation and aristocratic connections and after the restoration of the monarchy, twenty-year-old Alexandre Dumas moved to Paris where he obtained employment at the Palais Royal in the office of the powerful duc d'Orleans. Literary career While working in Paris, Dumas began to write articles for magazines as well as plays for the Theatre . In 1829 his first solo play, Christine, proved equally popular and as a result, he was financially able to work full time at writing. However, in 1830, he participated in the revolution that ousted King Charles X and replaced him on the throne with Dumas' former employer, the duc d'Orleans, who would rule as Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King. Until the mid 1830s, life in France remained unsettled with sporadic riots by disgruntled Republicans and impoverished urban workers seeking change.

As life slowly returned to normal, the nation began to industrialize and with an improving economy combined with the end of press censorship, the times turned out to be very rewarding for the skills of Alexandre Dumas. After writing more successful plays, he turned his efforts to novels. Although attracted to an extravagant lifestyle, and always spending more than he earned, Dumas proved to be a very astute business marketer. With high demand from newspapers for serial novels, in 1838, he simply rewrote one of his plays to create his first serial novel. Titled "Le Capitaine Paul," it led to his forming a production studio that turned out hundreds of stories, all subject to his personal input and direction. From 1839 to 1841 Dumas, with the assistance of several friends, compiled an eight-volume collection of essays on famous criminals and crimes from European history, including essays on Beatrice Cenci and Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and more recent incidents including the cases of executed alleged murderers Karl Ludwig Sand and Antoine François Desrues. Dumas also collaborated with his fencing master Augustin Grisier in his 1840 novel The Corsican Brothers as well as Dumas's memoirs.

In 1840, he married an actress, Ida Ferrier, but continued with his numerous liaisons with other women, fathering at least three illegitimate children. One of those children, a son named after him, would follow in his footsteps, also becoming a successful novelist and playwright. Because of their same name and occupation, to distinguish them, one is referred to as Alexandre Dumas pere, (French for father) the other as Alexandre Dumas, fils (French for son). Alexandre Dumas pere wrote stories and historical chronicles of high adventure that captured the imagination of the French public who eagerly waited to purchase the continuing sagas.

A few of these Works are: * Charles Vii At the Homes Of His Great Vassals (Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux), drama, adapted for the opera The Saracen by Russian composer Cesar Cui * the D'Artagnan Romances: * The Black Tulip (1850) * The Nutcracker (1844): a revision of Hoffmann's story, later adapted by Tchaikovsky as a ballet * The Gold Thieves (after 1857): a play that was lost, and rediscovered by the Canadian Reginald Hamel researcher in the Bibliotheque nationale de France in 2004 * Le Chevalier de Sainte-Hermine, 1869): the novel was his last major work and was lost until its rediscovery by Claude Schopp was announced in 2005. Dumas made extensive use of the aid of numerous ghostwriters of which Auguste Maquet was the best known. It was Maquet who outlined the plot of The Three Musketeers and its sequels, as well as several of Dumas' other novels.

When working together, Maquet proposed plots and wrote drafts, while Dumas added the details, dialogues, and the final chapters. His writing earned him a great deal of money, but Dumas was frequently broke or in debt as a result of spending lavishly on women and high living. The large and costly Chateau de Monte Cristo that he built was often filled with strangers and acquaintances who took advantage of his generosity. When King Louis-Philippe was ousted in a revolt, Dumas was not looked upon as favorably by the newly elected President, Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte . In 1851 Dumas fled to Brussels, Belgium to escape his creditors, and from there he traveled to Russia where French was the second language and his writings were enormously popular. Dumas spent two years in Russia before moving on to seek adventure and fodder for more stories. In March of 1861, the kingdom of Italy was proclaimed, with Victor Emmanuel II as its king. For the next three years, Alexandre Dumas would be involved in the fight for a united Italy, returning to Paris in 1864. Despite Alexandre Dumas' success and aristocratic connections, his being of mixed-blood would affect him all his life.

In 1843, he wrote a short novel, Georges , that addressed some of the issues of race and the effects of colonialism. Nevertheless, racist attitudes impacted his rightful position in France's history long after his death on December 5, 1870. In June 2005, Dumas' recently-discovered last novel The Knight of Sainte-Hermine went on sale in France. Within the story, Dumas describes the Battle of Trafalgar in which the death of Lord Nelson is explained. The novel was being published serially and was almost complete by the time of his death. A final two-and-a-half chapters was written by modern-day Dumas scholar Claude Schopp. Posthumous recognition Buried in the place where he had been born, Alexandre Dumas remained in the cemetery at Villers-Cotterets until November 30, 2002.

Under orders of the French President, Jacques Chirac, his body was exhumed and in a televised ceremony, his new coffin, draped in a blue-velvet cloth and flanked by four men costumed as the Musketeers: Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D'Artagnan, was transported in a solemn procession to the Pantheon of Paris, the great mausoleum where French luminaries are interred. In his speech, President Chirac said: "With you, we were D'Artagnan, Monte Cristo or Balsamo, riding along the roads of France, touring battlefields, visiting palaces and castles, with you, we dream." In an interview following the ceremony, President Chirac acknowledged the racism that had existed, saying that a wrong had now been righted with Alexandre Dumas enshrined alongside fellow authors Victor Hugo and Voltaire. The honor recognized that although France has produced many great writers, none have been as widely read as Alexandre Dumas. His stories have been translated into almost a hundred languages, and have inspired more than 200 motion pictures.

Alexandre Dumas' home outside of Paris, the Chateau Monte Cristo, has been restored and is open to the public Alexandre Dumas books

Question: Which French author wrote the 1850 adventure story The Black Tulip ?
Answer: Alexandre Dumas